Demonstratives

Aprende como usar “Demonstratives” en inglés aquí:

Demonstratives are words that show which person or thing is being referred to. We have four demonstratives: this, that, these, those.

How to Use Demonstratives

The English language uses demonstratives as either adjectives or pronouns.

Demonstrative adjectives modify nouns, and are followed by a noun:

This boy is my brother. (modifies boy)

That book is good. (modifies book)

I like those houses. (modifies houses)

These French fries are delicious. (modifies French fries)

Using demonstrative adjectives can be a useful way to clarify situations, especially in writing.

Demonstrative pronouns replace nouns (they stand on their own):

This is my brother

That is good.

I like those.

These are delicious.

It is important to use demonstrativepronounsonly when the speaker and listener are both clear on what you are referring to, in order to avoid confusion.

When to Use This, That, These, or Those

There are two main distinctions for when to use which demonstrative: distance and amount. For singular, use this or that, for plural, use these or those. For near items, use this or these, and for far items, use that or those.

BuzzFeed caught on quickly as a place to see humorous or otherwise entertaining lists about a variety of topics. From Game of Thrones jokes, to a list of pictures that will “restore your faith in humanity,” they eschewed the popular slide format of many other sites (such as The Huffington Post), and went straight for lists with images and gifs. This makes for a very easy-to-consume piece of content that gets passed around social media and email at a very rapid pace.

The founder and CEO of BuzzFeed, Jonah Peretti, released a memo on LinkedIn in 2013 stating the site reached 85 million unique visitors that August. Peretti also prophesized, “By this time next year we should be one of the biggest sites
on the web.” According to Alexa, they haven’t quite cracked the top hundred, but their global rank is 111, and in the United States, they’re the 39th most popular website.

Over the last year and a half they’ve made major changes to continue that popularity. Instead of sticking with list-only content, they’ve branched out into a wide array of quizzes for entertainment purposes, which are easily shared on Facebook, plus they’re creating videos on their YouTube Channel. They’ve also expanded their role as a news outlet by hiring dozens of reporters to provide coverage and information on the latest stories.

These changes are all helping their growth, but the number one thing they did to fuel growth in the last 2 years was to go international. It isn’t just the fact that they did it; it is the way they did it.

Enter: Duolingo. As many language-learners know (and Summit students know works great in conjunction with our teacher-led EnglishNow classes), Duolingo is a free language-learning app that helps users learn and practice the basics of many different languages. What’s ingenious about DuoLingo’s business model, is that once learners reach a certain level of understanding, the text they translate while practicing in the app, helps Duolingo translate content for its clients.

While the company originally used dummy text, the text being translated now it serves a purpose. Much of that text from English to other languages (specifically French, Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese) comes from BuzzFeed. Duolingo’s founder, Luis Von Ahn, wanted to put his language learners’ efforts to good use, and BuzzFeed wanted to expand into international markets without spending 20 cents per word for a professional human translator, or using a machine. Now, they’re both benefiting from this partnership using what Von Ahn calls “human computation.” The language learners are doing something very useful, but they’re doing it incidentally, almost as a side effect of their language learning.

This method has proven especially successful with tricky parts of language such as colloquialisms and idioms. “The straw that broke the camel’s back” doesn’t translate literally to anything useful, but a human language learner can find an idiom that matches it in the new language, and translate it to that instead. Perhaps other companies will look to this method for international translation in the future, and kill two birds with one stone.

Reading Comprehension

Buzzfeed Growth Quiz

Time limit: 0

Quiz-summary

0 of 7 questions completed

Questions:

1

2

3

4

5

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7

Information

You have already completed the quiz before. Hence you can not start it again.

6. Question

7. Question

We don’t use prepositions of time with words like every, last, next, this.
Replace the word in bold with the appropriate preposition of time: I went to Brazil last June.

Correct

Correct answer: in

Incorrect

Correct answer: in

Writing

INTERMEDIATE: Have you ever used a tool like Duolingo? In 200 words, explain your favorite methods of learning a language, and what different things you’ve tried.

ADVANCED: How do you think that this new method will affect future methods of translation and globalization? In 200 words, answer this question and discuss how you feel about the BuzzFeed-Duolingo partnership.